I met Sabrina shortly after I moved to Hong Kong in 2005. A mutual friend introduced us, and before long it was clear to me that I had much more in common with Sabrina than this mutual friend of ours, because we shared a love for music and our luck with the boys ran the same. There are very few times in life when you meet someone and right away you can picture the long friendship unfolding before your eyes. We laughed about how we’d be two crazy cat-lady roommates when we were sixty.

Music has always been a strong part of my life. I describe my favorite bands as fondly as if I were going over a list of past lovers. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to serial monogamy, rather than the forced celibacy my own personal life was experiencing. Early in the summer of 2006 I joined a website that was much like MySpace, but its purpose was to introduce you to people who shared your taste in music. After about a month of feeding my favorite music into this site, a list of “neighbors” with similar musical taste popped up, and one of them was a guy I’ll call Tom.

Tom lived in Australia and I was in Hong Kong, a million miles away from home. I was nearly thirty and Tom had just stepped into his twenties not so long ago. We quickly formed a friendship that got very flirty very fast. And while a part of me always knew this was a bit of a joke, the rational part of me started to be drowned out by the dipsy-dreamer side of me who wanted to meet him in Australia (he had invited me numerous times) and see what would happen…it’d be good for a laugh, I thought. I’m not sure how everything snowballed into a mess of misunderstanding, but I remember I finally told him he had to stop flirting with me because I was starting to develop feelings for him, and I knew that wouldn’t work.

That message did not go over as I had planned: I thought we’d be able to make a joke and move on, but Tom got weirded out and stopped talking to me. Cold. After speaking to each other online for hours every day, we were down to zero in the time it took for me to hit the send key. Was that it? I was devastated, and the only person I felt I could talk to about it was Sabrina.

I should mention that Sabrina had recently left Hong Kong to go back home to Australia, and she had also joined this site I was using. And coincidentally, she chose to go to school in Tom’s hometown… so they became friends. I’ll never forget the day she emailed me with news that she and Tom had hooked up and were going to continue to hook up and wasn’t that funny? Looking back on it, I think the shock made me inarticulate. I couldn’t come up with anything to say that didn’t make me sound like I was simply jealous that she got to be with him and I didn’t. In fact, what really bugged me was her betrayal: regardless of how two people meet, you can’t possibly start something with a guy when you knew he humiliated one of your friends.

The line of communication between me and Sabrina was starting to unravel. First I told her, grudgingly, that I was fine with everything and happy for her. Then she said she was ending things with Tom because she didn’t want to ruin our friendship. Then she said she was ending things with Tom because she realized how awful he was and thought she could do better. Her flip-flopping ticked me off – I had no idea what sort of loneliness and depression she was going through at the time, having ended her Asian adventure and then moving miles away from home to a town that felt completely backwards to her. Tom was the only person she knew there, and the boy could turn on the charm when it really benefited him the most.

When I left Hong Kong to go back home to California I stopped talking with her; she had sent me an email saying I had said some mean and nasty things. I figured I didn’t want to wreck our friendship any more than I already had, and I decided I would keep as far away as possible from her relationship with Tom. I knew I had a life to start living here in California and she had to live hers in Australia. It was at this time that “The Hardest Part” by Coldplay started singing to me more than I really wanted it to:

And the hardest part
Was letting go, not taking part
Was the hardest part

I could feel it go down
Bittersweet, I could taste in my mouth
Silver lining the cloud
Oh and I
I wish that I could work it out

The end of the story is that Tom ended up treating Sabrina as poorly as he treated me. Maybe even worse. I knew this because I got an email from Sabrina saying so. She had broken all contact with him, and she wanted to know if I could put the whole mess behind me. She told me a story about how she had spent so much on him for his birthday and yet he still wanted more, that he always asked her to drive up to see him and that he had been messing around with other people. I couldn’t say that I had warned her because of my past garbled feelings, but I realized that Sabrina never wanted our friendship to snarl in the first place. Later, Sabrina mentioned that she had been listening to a lot of Coldplay herself during this time – “probably because I was so depressed,” as she put it.

I can never hate “The Hardest Part,” exactly. But I will always associate this song with a terrible time in my life when I thought I had lost my friend and it was all because of a boy, a problem I thought wouldn’t happen to me again after I left junior high. Oh, and we’ve since found out that Tom had pulled the same thing with another mutual online friend. We’re thinking of starting a survivors’ group and making T-shirts.